Founded in 1978 to teach, advance, and apply Descriptive Psychology

Descriptive Psychologyis an entirely differentapproach to understanding people and whatthey do.

Different how?

Every other approach to psychology and every school of psychotherapy is based on someone’s theory:behaviorism, psychoanalysis, social learning theory, attachment theory, and so on.

Rather than adding yet another theory of behavior or creating another school of psychotherapy, Descriptive Psychologybrings out what each of these perspectives and theories highlights and organizes about our shared world. It describes what all these (and more not yet invented) are theories and perspectivesabout.

Descriptive Psychologyarticulates the concepts we as persons share that enable us to meaningfully agree and disagree and have a coherent framework thatencompasses all our various perspectives, and us as observers.

Why is this so important?

Descriptive Psychology has applications for psychology and other fields far beyond the usual purview of psychology (for example, developing with NASA a “Knowledge support system for the first lunar outpost mission”). The unusual scope and comprehensiveness of the enterprise of describing persons, behavior,reality, and language, as well as the interrelationships among these, with scientific precision, required “a fresh start.” Dr. Peter G. Ossorio, founder ofDescriptive Psychology, also introduced appropriate methodologies for this. The result is enhanced understanding and clarity about people, our individualdifferences, our social practices, cultures, relationships, and world — in short, “our place in the scheme of things” and how everything fits together.

We invite you to engage with our diverse community of psychologists, psychiatrists, computer scientists, aerospace engineers, attorneys, physicists,mathematicians, theologians, and others exploring and applying Descriptive Psychology to ourrespective fields and lives.

“Discovery consists in seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what
nobody else has thought.”

– Nobel Laureate Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

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SDP Community News

Wynn Schwartz will be presenting two papers, each based on the Judgment Diagram, at the Midwinter meeting of the Society for Philosophical and Theoretical Psychology (APA Division 24), Nasville, TN, March 1-3, 2019. The presentation titles are: "Sanctioned transgression or what turns conservatives and fundamentalists reactionary?" and "Social progress and the just choice".

Cleaned up, full text PDFs are now available on the website for Advances in Descriptive Psychology, Volumes 5, 6 and 7. Individual chapters have been extracted and linked to each author’s drop down publication list.

Click here for the full text PDF of Ray Bergner's new paper entitled The Case Against the Case Against Free Will in The Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology.

Click here to view a cumulative list of items on our Community News forum.

Sample Topics

Please note that all "Sample Topics" lists are drafts. Don’t hesitate to contact Charlie Kantor or Ned Kirsch about changes you’d like us to implement.